An extremist, not a fanatic

April 30, 2013

Biased news

In 2010, 140,000 children aged under five died in Bangladesh. If the country had the same mortality rate (pdf) as the UK, only around 15,000 would have done so. This implies that around 125,000 Bangladeshi children die each year from poverty.

This fact, however, does not feature prominently in nightly news bulletins, even though it is equivalent to two Rana Plaza collapses every week.

There is, of course a simple reason for this. The news reports abnormal events, not normal ones; "dog bites man" is not news. Collapsing buildings are abnormal and so newsworthy whilst acute poverty is normal and so isn't news.

This bias is inherent in the nature of news. And yet it can be misleading. You cannot understand why so many Bangladeshis tolerate working in sweatshops until you realize that doing so gives their children not just a better chance in life, but a better chance of life. Thanks in part to the economic development brough by those sweatshops, child mortality in Bangladesh has fallen.

However, news reports which draw attention to the evils of sweatshops but not to those of rural poverty understate the benefits which such sweatshops have brought. Yes, they're hellholes which perhaps could and should be improved upon - but they're better than the alternative.

In this sense, news generates a bias amongst its western consumers; it encourages a hostility to globalization and industrialization even though these are - albeit imperfect - routes out of poverty.

There's a parallel here with attitudes towards crime reporting. It's a commonplace that whilst crime has fallen in recent years, the fear of it hasn't. A big reason for this, I suspect, is that violent crime - being abnormal - gets reported whilst folks living safely, being normal, does not. Ordinary reporting thus warps our perspective.

You cannot reasonably judge a probability distribution merely by looking at the far tail of it. But this is what the news invites us to do.

There's another relevant bias here. Whilst under-reporting deaths from rural poverty the news is full of the doings of the rich and powerful. This too can have pernicious unintended effects. Laboratory experiments (pdf) have found that the mere act of communicating with others can induce them to behave more altruistically towards us. This implies that we are likely to be better-disposed towards the rich and powerful than we otherwise would be, and less well-disposed to the silent poverty-stricken billions. This too generates a bias towards tolerating poverty.

I say all this as a caveat to a common complaint. Everyone complains - with justification - about bad, right-wing, dumbed-down linkbait journalism. But even when journalists are doing their jobs well, they are contributing to some unpleasant biases, by the very nature of what constitutes news. You cannot, rationally, base your political opinions in what your see in the news.

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I agree sensationalism is the main driver of coverage of these tragedies.

BUT!

I think there is nonetheless a key factor that separates a story like this one from the other breed of tragedies like a man-eating shark eating a man, which is really only newsworthy if it happens on dry land. But I digress...

Anyway, in the case of factory fires and collapses we find ourselves calling the shots in the trolley problem". Yeah, these guys are better off and yeah, suicides at Chinese Foxconn factories are fewer than in the surrounding rural areas. But we are agents in these fewer deaths. Some news sources make explicit arguments along these lines. Maybe they do so because they can add a serious tone to the story, or maybe they do so because they are trying to raise a scandal at home against local brands. In any case, it gets mentioned.

And let's not think those of us in wealthier nations are being cold, objective rational players who are carrying out altruistic efforts that are unpalatable yet worthy. We're not that saintly.

If we really were that saintly we would also make a cold calculation to offer more affordable goods to improve the lives of Bangladeshi workers by relaxing our safety standards, thereby saving Bangladeshi lives at the expense of a lower number of deaths at home. This scenario is hardly the state of the world at present. We will gladly flip the switch on the tracks when the train runs over strangers, but not when it runs over our friends.

@ Strategist - I used that word "perhaps" simply because there is of course an argument that improving labour standards might lead capitalists to shift production to other countries, and I didn't, for the sake of this post, want to take a view on that question.
(And, generally speaking, I'm not keen on moralistic finger-pointing and giving policy advice from thousands of miles away.)

>>>And, generally speaking, I'm not keen on moralistic finger-pointing and giving policy advice from thousands of miles away

However it was very refreshing to read your views on events that did occur thousands of miles away, especially in the developing world. Coming from that part of the world, I feel a distinct lack of awareness of the topics that you touch upon in your blogs. I am a huge fan of your blogs and your way of thinking through issues that affect the working class all over the world, not just in the UK. Hoping to read many more of your views on human biases and overton windows and how they facilitate development, free market policies, globalization and top down managerialism etc in the developing world.

I would like to see some evidence that "life, however nasty, in these cities is preferable to the miseries of rural poverty. Similarly, life working in what we deem a sweatshop is, for millions, preferable to the alternatives available to them."

As usual the article takes a western view of beneficial. Living on land you can call your own, growing food you can eat yourself = poverty! *gasp* they don't have money to pay for water bills, electric bills, sales taxes, income taxes, rent and the like. They aren't earning wages slaving for multinational clothing companies, horrors.

In South America the corporations would sieze subsistance farms en mass and make everyone bananna sharecroppers. It worked until they did the same in multiple places leaving the newly dispossessed on land they did not own growing banannas that they can't eat or sell profitably

Back during the early days of the Industrial revolution England had to drastically restrict hunting and land rights to "encourage" peasants to toil in the new factories. I'm not saying subsistance farming is all puppies and sunshine. I just can't take the bald assertion that it is preferable to 5-7 years getting paid pennies to make shoes and leaving your body a broken mess after a few years.

Hmm. Although it's certainly true that journalism concentrates on both "sensation" and the doings of the rich and powerful, so does much of world literature. (Aristotle had a great deal to say on this point.)

I'm inclined to think that journalism, like most (all?) literature, can best be understood as parable. The individual case is anecdotal; it's the subtext that matters.

When the right wing tabloids carry stories about "benefit scroungers" they're merely illustrating by way of specific example that most of us think (like it or not, and according to ComRes) that the benefit system in the UK is failing.

Comlaining about the press doesn't lead anywhere - it's just shooting the messenger.